Research and Publications

Reimagining and reconstructing feminist (digital) utopias to bolster democracy in cyberspace

October 17, 2024 at 16:00 CET

Crystal Whetstone, Bilkent University

Cyberfeminists in the 1980s and 1990s saw only possibilities in the cyber realm, whether in Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985) or VNS Matrix’s “A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21^st Century” (1991), the latter of which triumphantly declared “we are the future cunt.” Such optimism has long since shriveled. Today online misogyny (often facilitated by artificial intelligence) abounds in deepfakes, cheapfakes, doxing, trolling, mis/disinformation, and other forms of technology-facilitated (TF) or information and communication technology (ICT)-facilitated gender-based violences (GBV) intended to humiliate, harm and silence women and girls with the ultimate aim of revoking women and girls’ political power. Yet violence against women and girls is widely seen as apolitical. Following Laura Bates (2020), we construct misogyny as an ideology in whose name mass murders committed by anyone other than white men from the global North would see them deemed “terrorists” and “extremists.” Online misogyny is spreading rapidly and reaping both digital and physical world violences (Vickery and Everbach 2018; Bates 2020; McGlynn and Johnson 2021; Henry et al. 2021; McGlynn and Woods 2022).

We ask: What does re-imagining feminist digital utopias do for the futures of democracy and cyber security, as well as the burgeoning area of feminist cybersecurity? Critically re-reading feminist sci-fi and fantasy texts including Sultana’s Dream: A Feminist Utopia by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and Cinderella Is Dead by Kaylnn Bayron alongside earlier optimistic work from cyberfeminists, we tease out future directions for an inclusive, welcoming, accessible and democratic cyberspace intended for scholarly, policy and civic audiences. We meld feminist (cyber) utopic thinking with the empirical work of activists and feminist and critical scholars already countering oppressive uses of technology around the globe.

This includes groundbreaking work by Kurasawa et al. (2021), Bailey (2021), Hajj (2021), and mining lessons learned from case studies of Uyghur women in diaspora challenging China’s misogynistic anti-Muslim racism (Witteborn 2011; Yılmaz 2024), the digital activism of feminist, queer and peace advocates in Nepal and Sri Lanka (K.C. & Whetstone forthcoming), Black women’s digital resistance against misogynoir, anti-Black racist misogyny, (Bailey 2021) and the digital projects of feminist counterdata in Mexico and other countries that challenge an epidemic of feminicides, referring to those women killed for being women (D’Ignazio et al. 2022). We take seriously the experiences of feminists, minorities and activists from the global south (including the global south within the global north).

In an era of dystopian online realities, we argue feminist utopic visions offer a way forward to further democracy and cyber security when combined with grounded analysis of work resisting technology-facilitated gender-based violence as drawn from a range of places globally. The article also aims to further develop feminist cybersecurity as an area of research and offer activist and policy directions to expand women and girls’ political power online to ensure their full and equal inclusion in democracy.

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Expertise in Cyber Diplomacy

November 6, 2024 at 16:00 CET

Lars Gjesvik, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs

Johann Ole Willers, Copenhagen Business School

International negotiations over issues of digitalization and cyber issues have taken on a profound standing in international affairs. This article adds to recent scholarship on these issues and draws attention to the role of expertise in structuring and shaping these negotiations. Leveraging a range of qualitative materials, we identify key trends in the composition of cyber diplomacy expertise and investigate how these have shaped outcomes of international negotiations across key diplomatic arenas. We find that expertise matters for the outcome of international cyber negotiations along two main avenues. First, the composition of expertise during early stages of field formation tend to spill over into institutional arrangements that create lasting path dependencies, as in the example of the institutionalization of cyber diplomacy discussions within the UN 1st committee.

Second, compositions of expertise within state administration tend to produce contingent outcomes where issue complexity opens the door for struggles over what type of knowledge is best suited to address a given issue, resulting in variations in terms of how countries mobilize expertise – oftentimes underpinned by organizational politics within the diplomatic apparatus and across sub-state agencies beyond the MFA. Combined, the existence of expertise-based institutional lock-in effects and rapid technological change produce temporal mismatches that create an awkward bases for diplomatic interactions to deliver impactful results. Navigating this diplomatic arena requires not only diplomatic skill but also combinations of subject matter expertise across law and technology. Forging such networks of expertise is expensive and reproduces unequal access to diplomatic negotiations with small developing nations severely disadvantaged.

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The 6 principles of Justice by Design – How to make technology more just

November 21, 2024 at 16:00 CET

Els De Busser, University of Amsterdam

Technology can cause unjust situations and harm by the way it is planned, designed, developed or deployed. In general, we tend to fix technology-generated problems by intervening when technology is already causing harm. Such approach turns justice into an afterthought rather than the intended purpose. What if we could move the attention to justice to an earlier point in time, at the point of planning and designing a technology and make it the default setting?

This way of thinking is known from the field of privacy by design and security by design. In this conceptual paper design thinking is applied to the creation of digital technologies in order to make the process generate a more just outcome. 6 principles are presented to offer guidance to organizations involved in this field who want to support and implement justice by design.

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Trust, interdependence, and power in cyber statecraft

December 12, 2024 at 16:00 CET

Ahana Datta, University College London

What is the role of political economy in cyber statecraft? Nation-states develop, exercise and restrict the use of offensive and defensive capabilities in cyberspace to meet their strategic objectives. To do so, they rely on a number of private actors; a state’s ability to coerce them is governed by structural variables of trust, interdependence, and power in state-state and state- private relations. We analyse these relationships through a conceptual framework that theorises political, social, economic, and technological trust within cyberspace as an information system.

Contrasting Chinese and Western cyber ecosystems, we find that leveraging domestic political economy is key in projecting national cyber power, at the cost of adverse structural outcomes, such as asymmetry, volatility, and potential fragmentation in cyberspace. Implications for coercive and cooperative strategies, and the future of cyber statecraft are discussed.

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Digital transnational repression and the practice of dissident cyber-espionage

January 9, 2025 at 16:00 CET

Siena Anstis, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto

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